Dandelion Iron Book One

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  I listened carefully. Micaiah was talking about his past.

  “I guess it made sense,” he said. “I was around all these doctors and scientists all the time, watching them. The human body is amazing, a miracle. Even more fascinating? The mind, our logic, our emotions.”

  Micaiah gently applied instant sutures, all the while talking and soothing her. She was relaxing, but she could mutate into a demonic harpy at any minute. What was her medicine? And where could we get some more? My sister was right. We had to help Petal before we could run.

  The boy picked up her black bag and brought it over to the window, where Wren sat and I stood. We all crouched down so we could whisper.

  “How much do you two know about what Pilate’s been giving her?” Micaiah asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “None of my business,” Wren said at first, but then sighed. “You and I both know what her medicine is, Johnson. So cut to the chase. Is there any in there?”

  Micaiah rummaged through Petal’s bag of tricks.

  “How do you guys know what her medicine is?” I asked. “Or are you both doctors too?”

  “Hush, Cavvy,” Wren said, “and you better pray there’s enough for both of you. Once that first round of drugs and your adrenaline wears off, you’re going to be one hurtin’ pup.” When she talked, she kept her hand near her mouth—to hide her mouth now that her pretty smile was gone. It didn’t do much to hide the stink of her drinking though.

  “I think I found what we need.” Micaiah pulled out a length of rubber tubing, a syringe still in its plastic, and a vial. “Diacetylmorphinesextus. Otherwise known as Skye6.”

  Skye6 was a synthetic morphine, real easy to make, and real cheap. One more miserable thing that the Sino gave to this weary world. I choked in a breath.

  If Petal was a Skye6 addict, then Pilate had helped to keep her addicted. The son of a skank.

  “How can he do it to her?” I asked. “How can he keep her hooked, and how can she believe it’s medicine and not narcotics?”

  Micaiah shook his head sorrowfully. “I don’t know. But sometimes people can make themselves believe crazy things.”

  “Yes, they can,” Wren muttered. “And what Petal and Pilate have is complicated. Suffice to say, we’ve seen Petal off her meds, so we’ll give her what she needs.”

  Complicated. Like what Pilate and Wren had. Like, me, Micaiah, and Sharlotte. I sighed.

  “How much do we give her?” Micaiah asked.

  I held out a hand.

  He gave me the vial. Words were scrawled across a white label in Sharpie marker—the name of the drug and two-hundred milligrams, a slash, and a twenty milliliters. I shook it in my right hand, my left hanging limp. There wasn’t but a quarter left. “Feels like five milliliters left, which I bet is the dose. Four doses per vial. We got lucky.”

  “Dang, Cavvy,” Wren said. “That’s impressive.”

  “We have two more vials.” Micaiah loaded up the syringe and removed the air inside like any doctor drama you ever saw. He’d loaded a rig before. Obviously. “Eight doses. When the time comes, Cavvy, I think I’ll try and give you a half-dose. You won’t have Petal’s tolerance.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want that evil drug in me.”

  Wren shook the whiskey in her bottle. “I’ll try and save some of this for you, but I can’t promise anything. Hard for me to stop until I see the bottom of the bottle.”

  “No whiskey. No drugs. I’ll be fine.”

  Wren laughed at that. “Whatever you say, Princess.” Then she shook her head. “You guys are brilliant. Even you, Johnson. And I thought you only had your looks and your viability.”

  Micaiah moved away and talked in quiet whispers to Petal. She woke up long enough for him to tie the rubber tube around her arm and to slip a needle into her vein. To dope her up like Pilate had been doing.

  I would never forgive Pilate for keeping her so enslaved. Never.

  Micaiah moved back. “We need to get out of here.”

  “Yes, we do,” I said.

  The wind died down, and that was when we all heard the roaring sound in the distance. It’d been a long time since I’d heard such a noise.

  Internal combustion engines, a lot of them, coming toward us. Say what you will about diesel engines, but they do have a distinctive sound.

  We’d waited too long.

  (ii)

  Wren buttoned up her shirt, threw on her leather vest, and retrieved an AZ3 from the floor. She snapped back the action. “Cavvy, you run with the boy. Pilate and Petal will be fine here while I take care of the new batch of skanks. I’m going to make them pay for bustin’ out my teeth.”

  I’d watched Mama argue with Wren, then Sharlotte, and I’d even tried it myself. It was useless. I couldn’t stand up to Wren, couldn’t fight her, and reasoning with her even in the best of situations was an iffy proposition. Yet I’d have to try. We couldn’t fight the reinforcements coming for the boy. Pilate was down and Petal was nodding.

  The time for fighting was over. It was time for thinking. And for engineering. I knew exactly what we needed to do.

  I took a deep breath, steadied myself, and spoke in a strong voice. “Fifty meters north of the office complex is a truck with an ASI attachment, prolly the 3.0.3—the very worst release ever to come out of Detroit. Most likely, some salvage monkey got fed up and left it for another vehicle. If I could get the truck up and running, we’d have our getaway.”

  Wren immediately listed off everything that was wrong with my plan. Might as well have been talking with Sharlotte. “That’s crazy, Cavvy. We ain’t got time for you to fiddle with no engine. And where would we get the wood? No, you take the horse. I’ll stay and hold them off.”

  “Give me ten minutes to see if I can get the truck moving. Might be fine, just abandoned, but I won’t know if I don’t look at it. In the meantime, you get Pilate and Petal ready to move. Micaiah can search for wood.”

  Wren cut me off. “Ten minutes? Yeah, we both know that’s twenty minutes in engineer talk. If not an hour. Even if you could get it working, they’ll hear the ASI. Come right for it.”

  “With the wind blowing? Over them loud internal combustion engines? Not a chance. Come on, Wren. You can’t fight ’em all.”

  She looked me dead in the eye. “I’ve spent my whole life looking for a fight I can’t win. Why do you think I came on this cattle drive?”

  “Don’t kill us in the process. When it was time for fighting, you fought. You saved us. Now it’s time to run. Let me be the hero. Let me save us.”

  “Save us?” Wren smirked. “You couldn’t save me not an hour ago. You didn’t take the shot. Again. Seems to me you ain’t much of a hero.”

  “Maybe not with a gun,” I said. I felt the heat in my face, ashamed, and I had to look away. I couldn’t fight her, but maybe she’d take pity on me.

  Micaiah shuffled a bit. Petal sighed. The wind sighed with her. With it blowing, we couldn’t hear the diesel engines.

  “Okay, Cavvy,” Wren said. “I’m giving you ten minutes, not a second more. I’ll gather up the troops. You get going, Princess.”

  “Not princess. Engineer,” I said with a nervous smile. I scooped up Tina Machinegun and sped out of the room.

  The snow dropped down in swirling walls of white and cold and I thought about Petal’s rhyme. The sky was falling, Chicken Little, but I wasn’t going to let the world end.

  I kicked my way through thirty centimeters of snow and got to the truck, a Ford Excelsior, with fat, deep-treaded snow tires. Lucky us. Thank God, His Son, and all the angels and saints in Heaven for the blizzard. It would hide our escape.

  But what about Sharlotte and our headcount? Would they survive the storm? Or had the soldiers in the vehicles already found them and killed them all? Couldn’t think about that.

  Couldn’t think about Sharlotte at all right then.

  (iii)

  I opened the driver’s side door and a skeleton in rags t
umbled out causing me to curse and shiver. Didn’t calm my racing brain any. My thoughts were like skipped stones across a stormy pond.

  Maybe the engine was just fine, I reasoned, and the poor salvage monkey just got unlucky. No time to check for cause of death.

  I stepped over the bones and set Tina Machinegun on the passenger seat. The Ford was junked up, pipes and debris scattered around. Had the dead salvager been killed while trying to fix the thing? Seemed like it. Even if there was something seriously wrong, all I needed was steering and propulsion. I turned the steering wheel. The over-sized tires twisted in the snow.

  The wind whistled like the Devil in church. After a mighty gust, it died down enough for me to hear the diesel engines again. How far away? Impossible to tell. The wind might be carrying the sound.

  Dry kindling, split logs, and round trunks of wood lay heaped in the back of the cab. Greasy, disintegrating rags filled the cracks. We had fuel for the engine. Thank God.

  I rushed out and around to the bed and swept snow off the ASI attachment. I could check components later. I needed a fire. I was a little afraid even with the wind blowing, the oncoming soldiers might see the smoke. Then again, God hid heroes in the Bible all the time.

  Running to the cab, I threw open the back suicide door, grabbed the oily rags and saw a box of FireForge on the floor. The red lettering of the box promised “a quick fire, hot and immediate!” Better still, they had a bottle of Fast Boil. I still remembered the song the traveling saleswoman had sung to us.

  In a hurry?

  Don’t toil!

  Use Fast Boil.

  It never spoils!

  I was going to put that last part to the test. I grabbed an armload of supplies and sped back to the bed and plunked down the packages. First the FireForge. I ripped it open and fluffed the ultra-flammable material. I snatched a waterproof match out of my pocket and lit it up.

  The wind killed that one dead as well as the next couple. Hands trembling, I dropped two more. Had to get a match to the igniter. Had to get a fire started to heat the water. Had to. Please, Lord Jesus.

  The chemical smells of the FireForge soured my nose. I bent closer. I got a match going and touched it to the cottony accelerant. The tinder flashed into flames. I tossed in the oily rags and dry wood. The explosion of heat had me sweating. Good.

  I emptied my canteen into the tank. Didn’t have water-tubes, another limitation to the 3.0.3. We were going to need more water, a lot more, but I could get what we did have boiling. The Fast Boil came in powdered form, and I sprinkled the chemicals in the water to loosen the molecules so they’d turn from liquid into steam quicker.

  I stuffed snow down the top of the tank, added more wood to the firebox, and then started looking for why the salvage monkeys had abandoned the truck in the first place. I was dangerously close to my ten-minute mark, but I also knew Wren would give me a few extra minutes. She was right. Engineering time differed from normal time.

  Scurrying on to the bed, I cleared snow away from the hole where the ASI pistons interfaced with the drive train. If there was a problem there, I’d have to grab Tina Machinegun and fight Micaiah’s aunts to the death. But no, the big pieces of the engine looked fine.

  Must be a problem with the ASI itself. Heat from the fire was clearing away snow around the boiler, which gave me a clear view.

  I saw the problem. All four of the pipes leading to the compression chamber had holes in them. Without sealed pipes, the steam couldn’t get enough pressure to pump the pistons. The salvage monkey had most likely died before he could fix the problem.

  So the fix was easy. Sure. Got any auxiliary ASI 3.0.3 piping on you? I didn’t.

  The FireForge burned like hellfire, the old logs burned like paper, and I kept having to refill the firebox.

  Back in the cab, I rummaged through the debris, praying full novenas, before I found the piping tape, a whole roll, but how old? Ten years gone? Fifteen?

  From under the seat, I dug out an ASI toolbox with pipe wrenches and two spare pipes. I needed four, but well, you know—beggars, choosers, all that.

  I sprinted back to the pipes and jacked loose the bolts tightened by years of rust. God gave me strength and I got the two new pipes in. I taped up the other two with tape that wasn’t sticky at all.

  Just had to hope it was heat-activated shrink tape.

  I stuffed more snow into the tank. I had a fire. I had sealed pipes, hopefully. Now I just needed steam.

  The diesel engines seemed like they were on top of us.

  Please, God, help me.

  In the driver’s seat, I checked the homemade gauges covering the electric displays. My pressure was bad. Prolly wouldn’t spin a bicycle tire.

  Still. I clutched in. Geared in.

  The Excelsior shuddered like a cow lurching out of March mud. Growled, spun, growled some more, then stopped moving. Not enough pressure. I threw her in neutral to wait for the needle to creep into the green on the gauge.

  Every minute punched me in the belly. I didn’t want to pick up the rifle and fail fighting again. I wanted this to work, to be the unexpected hero, and come through in my own engineering way, just as Wren had always come through with her guns.

  The wind died for an instant, the snow cleared, and in the distance, a dozen black all-terrain ATV’s barreled through the snow, coming right at us.

  Now. It had to be now. Work.

  Begging heaven, my bloody hands wet on the gear shifter, I threw her in gear again and drove the gas pedal to the floor.

  The Ford wrestled forward, churning through the snow.

  Not a second to lose.

  I rocketed over to the apartment and tore into the courtyard. The ATVs hadn’t found us yet, but we only had seconds.

  Micaiah and Wren got Pilate in the back. Petal climbed in, doped up, but moving. Wren threw a leg over Christina Pink. Micaiah slid into the cab next to me.

  We raced out of the courtyard and headed north, into the wind, the snow, the storm. Wren galloped after us, her green poncho fluttering darkly against the white landscape.

  We’d done it. We’d escaped. But we weren’t safe yet.

  We still had some fighting to do amongst ourselves.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sexual ethics, the sanctity of human life, God, the Holy Roman Catholic Church—you cannot pull them apart. They are bound together by fate, history, and divine will. While we respect the work of the New Morality, we cannot tolerate their support of the ARK. God will save our species, not Tiberius Hoyt nor his Satanic research.

  —Archbishop Jeremy Corfu

  The Ecumenical Council on Ethics and Procreation

  Baltimore, Maryland

  October 7, 2057

  (i)

  A while later, the steering wheel was sticky from my blood. Dang gunshot wounds. Running for your life will do that to a girl. The second I remembered about the wounds, a rockslide of agony covered me. Left me breathless. Wren had warned me that once the drugs and adrenaline cleared my system I’d feel the full effects of being shot twice. Even so, I kept us going.

  “You okay, Cavatica?” Micaiah asked.

  I nodded. My brain had slowed down. Finally. “We’ll need you to take everyone’s water and get it into the tank and any snow that’s in the bed. And there’s a bottle of Fast Boil back there.”

  “Does that stuff actually work?”

  I swallowed, croaked out the jingle, and somehow managed a smile.

  We stopped so Micaiah could take care of the engine and Petal could get Pilate into the cab. We cleared out the backseat and burned everything that could be burned. The wood was termited and dry, so it burned like paper and the ASI 3.0.3s were horribly inefficient. Like driving around a hungry brick fireplace.

  Petal, gone to nodding town on Skye6, slept holding Pilate. His chest rose and fell, thank God. Petal’s Mauser lay on the floor, carelessly thrown there.

  Wren rode up on Christina Pink, worrying over Pilate. My sister’s face colored gray g
oing pasty.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  She spit as if disgusted by the question, reined Christina Pink back and moved away, keeping her eyes to the south. Nothing but snow followed us. We’d left tracks heading out of the office complex, but the force and fierceness of the driving snow would soon wipe away our trail.

  We drove until we found an old suburban neighborhood. Might’ve been North Arvada or Boulder, not sure, only that we found ourselves in the middle of a graveyard of houses, entombed in white. Most didn’t look salvaged at all, which made them seem even more creepy and silent in the blizzard.

  Night was coming, and we needed more wood and fast. Also, I’d need something from Petal’s bag of tricks ’cause the pain buried me. Hopefully she had more medical adhesive without Skye6.

  I chose a driveway at random and pulled in. The windows of the house were as black as the inside of a coffin.

  Micaiah jumped off the bed and came around with Tina Machinegun slung across his shoulder.

  I banged out of the truck and my knees nearly came unhinged. My head spun woozy from blood loss, thirst, hunger, full of agony. I should’ve stayed in the cab, but with Pilate down and Petal sleeping, I wanted to help the boy get fuel for the steam engine. Wren, as usual, wasn’t around.

  I washed my hands off in the snow and swore I’d force myself to be okay. I was shot. No big deal. I was tough.

  Micaiah and I walked right through the front door of the house. Sad to think about that unlocked door. In what kind of panic had the people left? The sky would’ve been black from the Yellowstone Knockout, ash covering everything, people throwing their possessions into whatever vehicle they had only to jam up the freeways. Others prolly didn’t even try and died in their homes.

  Sure the houses in the Juniper were haunted. Standing in the kitchen, I could feel the sadness of the ghosts around me.

  Micaiah took hold of a cabinet door and ripped it from its hinges. I tried to do the same, but ended up falling against the wall, eyes squeezed closed.

  He moved over to me. Close enough to feel his heat. “I know you’re trying to be strong, but you can’t go on this. I need to give you a half-dose of the Skye6.”